Demo: The Movie – Production Blog 2

I remembered two things from the previous day: we did a bunch of props shopping in the morning, and I found out what ‘Chicken Fried Steak’ is. On reflection I could happily have seen out my days without such knowledge.

Day 2 – Thursday 15th August – Buena Vista to Durango/Silverton

Alom leans on the car to explain our route across the US.

A bitty day, this. We were on camera at 0830 for a crucial link, but we’d deliberately left the day easy to give ourselves a chance to recover. So, we needed to (a.) cover ground between Pikes Peak and our next major stop, and (b.) shoot enough ‘on the road’ material to cover that. Easy: find a nice quiet road going in roughly the right direction, then pull off and set up the camera:

Setting up to film a road in Colorado

Which looked nice enough:

A gravel road in Colorado

…so of course we wanted some moving shots, and therefore rigged a little GoPro camera to the side of the car with a suction cup. Which led to about 40 minutes of this:

Alom walks the verge looking for a detached GoPro camera.

We found it, and of course it was still recording. GoPros are like that.

Now, if you’re thinking this film is sounding all hoo-yah bromance road trip, all “Fear and Loathing and Science Demonstrations“, I’m going to have to disappoint. We’re not really like that. Indeed, we spent quite a lot of Thursday admiring the wildflower verges:

A sunflower by the side of the road in Colorado.

…though I think we probably did, at some point, discuss whether a Breaking Bad-style meth lab would count as a chemistry demo. We’ll have to disappoint you on that one, too: “It’s a teacher training film!” doesn’t sound like it’d be a plausible defence. M’lud.

Pretty soon we were back in the mountains, and having found our motel in Durango we decided to head over a mountain pass into the old mining town of Silverton for the evening light. Now, our plan had been to shoot a bunch of ‘pretties’ and that would be that:

Jonathan lines up to film a Harley in Silverton

But just before the sun dropped over the skyline Alom realised that the footage we were getting looked sensational, and could be improved only if we… added a demo to the frame. We’d always intended to film demos along the journey, but we hadn’t quite worked out how to treat them. One look at this:

Hand boiler, Silverton, Colorado

…and we knew what we wanted. Because we like making our lives simpler, obviously. We tried to film a gyroscope demo too, but at 1900 the light had gone and we called it a day, heading into the nearest restaurant for a meal. A restaurant, I should note, which had a gigantic pink pig on the facade and huge ‘BBQ’ lettering.

Alom, peering blearily at the menu, asked of the owner: “What’s good?” To which she replied, deadpan, “We sell a lot of pork.” No kidding. For reference: the pulled pork was good, but the ribs were sensational.